microbes

microbes

A free public lecture titled "The Good Bugs: Why Agriculture Needs Microbes" will take place at 11 a.m. on Feb. 4, in 100 Thomas Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The speaker will be Marilyn Roossinck, professor of plant pathology and biology at Penn State.

Understanding the workings of these biofilm systems offers clues to how early life evolved, says Macalady, associate professor of geosciences. And, in addition to being windows onto Earth's history, these environments "have turned out to be really extraordinary model ecosystems for microbial ecology in general."

According to Robert Zubrin, president of the engineering firm Pioneer Astronautics and founder and president of the Mars Society, NASA's current vision of sending humans to the red planet depends on a 1,000-ton, 100-meter-long spacecraft. Too heavy to launch through Earth's atmosphere, the ship would have to be built on orbit, said Zubrin, at an estimated cost of $400 billion. He characterized it as a giant interplanetary spaceship engineered by a giant space agency.